Students at Beijing's Bayi School, President Xi Jinping's alma mater, have a new reason to boast: They worked with space scientists to develop and launch Chinese teenagers' first satellite, which is now orbiting hundreds of kilometers above Earth.

The 2.4-kg mini-satellite, Bayi Youngsters' Expedition, was launched atop a Long March 2D carrier rocket on Wednesday morning from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in Shanxi province. The major task of the launch was to lift two commercial Earth-observation satellites that are much larger and heavier.

The mini-spacecraft has a designed life span of 180 days in a sun-synchronous orbit and then will be controlled to fly back into the atmosphere to burn out so it won't become space debris, said Zhou Xiubin, a senior researcher at the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp who oversees the project.